Lately gender has become the talk of the Christian blogosphere again, and the perennial question of women’s ordination came up. I was ruminating on a post about this, but I realized I should actually do two posts, because there are really two subjects at issue: what gender means, and what ministry means.

I’ve thought about the former most of my life, since it’s impossible to avoid in our society; but the latter I’m only beginning to think about. I wasn’t brought up to have a minister. When I read about the sex-abuse scandals in Catholicism sometimes I’ll see victims say how awed they were by priests, how awed even their parents were, which made them reluctant to challenge the bad ones. Such a feeling is foreign to me.

But two things, or rather two relationships, have been giving me some idea of what pastorage means. One is my relationship with Telford, who, as I’ve said before, functioned as my de facto pastor at the big church we used to attend. The other is my relationship with my current Lutheran pastor. In some ways the relationships are the same, but they are also different, and this has partly to do with denominational difference.

When the women’s-ordination issue was discussed recently at Lutheran Confessions, Clint points to the New Testament women who are “preachers and prophets and speakers of the Word” as support for women’s ordination. This led Thomas to ask, “What if being ordained is different from preaching and prophesy?”

To Pentecostals, I gather, there isn’t a whole lot of difference. Telford’s own defense of women’s ordination, especially as he has elaborated it to me, leans heavily on the Pentecostal idea that the Spirit bestows gifts on all, and you can’t really predict who gets what gift until it shows up. This leads Pentecostal churches to not only frequently ordain women (though not all of them do), but to have little formal clerical structure at all.

I’ve long been of two minds about this. I like the attempt to recapture the God-intoxicated days of the early church, when the old power structures of ancient Mediterranean societies were being superceded by the kingdom. On the other hand, how do you know when somebody really has the Spirit? Generally, the response of the audience decides, which, especially in today’s culture, can blur the line between charisma in the Christian sense and charisma in the rock-star sense. Hence televangelists.

My current pastor is not a great preacher, but unlike with my previous pastor, I’ve been able to form a friendly relationship with him. He’s a kindhearted, unimposing guy, so I did not feel any particular awe of the office with him either. But I have gotten little flashes of it lately. The first time I felt this was on Ash Wednesday, when I went up to the alter to receive the ashes. Afterwards I found I was literally shaking — I don’t know why, but somehow going up there and receiving the sacrament moved me. Since Easter, I’ve been going up during communion, which I didn’t do before, to receive a blessing.

My response might be to the sacraments themselves, more than to the pastoral office. But I understand how the office has its mythos. I can see why people get irritated when people make the same arguments for women’s ordination that they make for women’s equality in any other employment. We’re not talking about civil-service contracts here.

Still, where I come from, the burden of proof rests on those who would bar a gender from an office rather than those who would let one in. So, I really don’t understand what about the pastoral mythos forbids women.

I’ve also been thinking about this because, oddly enough, my pastor thinks that I would make a good pastor. The first time he said this, several months ago, I thought he would be rid of this delusion as he got to know me, but he’s brought it up several times since then. I wonder what he sees in me.

So I’m curious what you readers think the office of pastor is all about. Since I know several of you are pastors or future pastors, I would think you must have some feel for what you’re called to. But hey, it goes out to the congregants too — what does the pastoral role mean to you?

I started writing a response to Kynn in the previous post, but it was getting so long I thought I should make a separate entry. (Meanwhile, Jennifer wrote a comment that echoes my sentiments.)

I should say, I don’t advocate somebody leaving their church over any old doctrinal disagreement. In fact, some time ago we were debating about Andrew Sullivan and I argued that disputing a church’s sexual teachings alone shouldn’t be enough reason to leave it. But there are disputes over theology and doctrine, and there are disputes over the very fundaments, and I think Spong is doing the latter.

I understand Kynn’s point (and Rob’s point) that being Christian is essentially to follow Jesus. However, there’s another question underlying that one: who is Jesus, and what did he do? This is basically the first thing that the early church established as dogma: that he is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who was crucified for our sins, died, rose again on the third day, ascended to heaven where he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead.

If you don’t believe that — and Spong doesn’t, so I gather — you’re following a different guy. As I said in this post, I agree with Kynn’s objection to fundamentalist churches who teach that Jesus came to earth to die, which I think is a nasty outgrowth of substitutional atonement theory. But believing in the significance of his death, resurrection etc. recontextualizes what he did in his life. I mean honestly, if I took Jesus as simply human I would think him a hypocrite. He tells people not to judge but goes around judging everybody; he rejects violence but flogs the money-changers out of the temple; he says he comes to fulfill Jewish law but blithely tosses is out as it suits him. That’s why I find him rather limited as a role model. He is in some ways, but in others he’s only a role model if you think you’re God.

Jesus’ actions also look different if you look at him as working on an unfinished project. For instance, while he was alive Jesus spent a lot of time arguing with Pharisees, the conflict culminating in their plot to kill him. But after the atonement was complete, Jesus called a Pharisee (Paul) to become a leader in his church, signaling that even those enemies are forgiven and taken into the fold. As I also said in the above-linked post, I see a connection between the general atonement for sins and the ability to love one’s enemies.

And as I noticed when I was reading Borg, disbelieving those credal statements also obliges you to disbelieve whatever Jesus said and did that indicates otherwise. This goes to the larger question of what texts you know Jesus through — canonical, edited canonical, the Gnostic Gospels, the Quran, etc. Really, there are a lot of sources about Jesus, and they will give you very different pictures of the guy. Moreover, strip out the divinity and Jesus’ teachings aren’t hugely different from a lot of other people’s, which is why it was perhaps inevitable that modern Unitarianism would de-center Jesus.

So anyway, all this is an incredibly long way of saying that I understand why the early church saw fit to define those particular heresies as heresies, while some other features of Spong’s and the UUs’ thought (universalism, symbolic and metaphoric readings of the Bible, the movements of the Spirit outside Christianity) were also around at the time but were not dogmatically rejected. The question of who Jesus is is the primary question of Christianity, from which everything else follows. So while Spong is a rather old-fashioned Unitarian (an orthodox Unitarian, if there is such a thing), he’s still a Unitarian. In asking the Anglicans to reject the Trinity, he’s asking them to throw over the unbroken lineage to the Apostles that they so treasure and to cast their lot with the heretics.

Jonathan, the new Methodist co-blogger at The Ivy Bush, links to an interesting discussion between heterodox Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong and Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams. He comments:

… if John Shelby Spong really believes what he apparently believes, he should be a Unitarian, not an Anglican. Instead of doing this, however, he is asking the Anglican church to become more Unitarian. The honest thing for him to do would be for him to become Unitarian. Does he have enough integrity to do this?

I’ve read a lot more about Spong than by him, but I’ve wondered the same thing. I certainly thought that while I was reading his allies, Marcus Borg and Bruce Bawer. And yet they’re all Anglicans.

Unitarian Universalists don’t get a whole lot of respect these days. I hear about them mainly through jokes, many of which UUs tell themselves. But the 400-year-old sect has an illustrious history. Last year I read about Dorothea Dix, and how her conversion to Unitarianism helped fuel her tireless work on behalf of the mentally ill. The Unitarians were also early advocates of religious tolerance and also claim an interesting intellectual heritage with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Certainly if Spong et al. actually became UU, it would give the church some strong public voices it hasn’t had in a while.

I can see how there would be some problems from their perspective, however. For one thing, since 1995 the main UU body has disclaimed actually being Christian. It reveres Jesus, but in kind of the same way that Muslims, Baha’is and some Hindus revere Jesus as a guy who really knew God instead of a guy who was God. The Spongites seem to believe the same, but it seems to be very important to them to claim the name of Christian for themselves. There is, underlying all their discussion, the implication that they’re the ones who really know what Jesus was about. They’re not foolish enough to call their view traditional, but in some sense they claim the true spirit of Jesus, that the answer to WWJD? in today’s world is what they’re doing. This was the gist of Bawer’s book Stealing Jesus, which I first mentioned here. It’s right in the title: Jesus was stolen by conservatives, and we need to steal him back.

The other reason, it seems to me, is that UUs are too darned tolerant for Spong. While Spong states flatly (and weirdly) that “theism is dead,” the UUA says it uses terms that can be “used with integrity by theist and nontheist members.” In fact, UUs generally oppose creeds, dogmas, and proselytization (another joke: “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a UU?” “Someone who knocks on your door and doesn’t know why”). Spong, however, comes across as a dogmatic evangelist. There’s no room in his church for theists, or believers in miracles or the resurrection of the dead.

So if Spong were UU he might ruffle as many feathers there as he does as an Anglican. The UUs don’t approve of taking over other churches, but that seems to be what Spong is trying to do, by calling it his own.